More homeless people in North Yorkshire are to be helped to get off the streets thanks to nearly £125,000 in grant aid from the Government.

Five groups in the area are to benefit from grants to 205 projects across the country announced by Housing Minister Hilary Armstrong.

The biggest grant locally - of £42,900 - will go to Scarborough's Home and Dry project, with York Salvation Army's outreach project getting £39,000.

Other groups to benefit include the Harrogate Homeless Project, which will get £11,000, the Whitby Resource Centre, which will get £20,200, and a project to provide housing in North Yorkshire by the Durham Initiative of Support in the Community, which gets £11,600.

Lindsay Hyde, from Home and Dry, said the money would be used to fund their housing support team which aimed to get 16 to 25-year-olds into permanent accommodation.

Young homeless people are first offered accommodation in a shared house, where they get support with money management and independent living skills, then they move into bedsits and eventually are offered small flats.

Home and Dry now have 23 units on their books, by working with the Holme Housing Association, and hope to increase that to 40.They also offer the young people education, training and support.

In York the Government cash will go towards the continuing work by a Salvation Army project to get homeless people off the streets as well as gathering information about how many people are on the streets and what their needs are.

Citadel captain, Drew McCombe, said was the only citadel in the country to be doing such detailed work with homeless people.

He said it was hoped the money would go towards setting up a bond guarantee scheme to help homeless people with the cost of putting a deposit down on rented accommodation.

Outreach project co-ordinator Tony Goldsboro said he had now established contact with around 200 homeless people who at one time or another have slept rough in York during his time in the city since 1996.

His figures have shown there are around 15 people on the streets of York on a typical night, mostly men, the majority over 25, but he said when the cold weather shelter opened in February, for the first time in 25 years, it had attracted 22 people a night.

He said the project offered a daily advice service at the Gillygate citadel as well as finding people permanent accommodation and keeping in touch with them afterwards.

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